


you lie careless, your head on my chest

by thegirl



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Female Jon Snow, Genderbending, Male Ygritte
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-28
Updated: 2015-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-11 18:12:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4446560
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegirl/pseuds/thegirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yves is the wild southroner, Joanna is the sensible member of the freefolk. </p>
<p>One of them is still a black brother. </p>
<p>One of them still dies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you lie careless, your head on my chest

**Author's Note:**

> This is completely different to _and there, persephone falls_ , but I am apparently addicted to genderbending these two and swapping their circumstances, so please don't read this expecting a continuation or prequel for THAT Jo and Yves, this is yet another AU. 
> 
> Also: I'd really appreciate it if you guys went and followed my tumblr, as I've just remade and I have a grand total of one follower (yay). So go check me out at mhysaa.tumblr.com :)

Yves is born in the Riverlands, and spends his childhood learning how to see underwater and pick pockets without being seen - his mother told him that the key was quick hands, and he learned with the thought of starving if caught hanging over him. 

He’d been the only babe to survive infancy, the others all went hungry in their cradles and mother says she thought he’d be the same at one point - there was a night where she daredn’t close her eyes in case he was dead when she opened them, all out of milk and bread, keeping him alive on bits of food she found in the gutters. “But you’re my fighter,” she told him with an adoring smile on her face, ending the story as she does every time “You survived.” 

Yves reminds himself of this on the first night he has to go without one of her stories - she’d gone in the night, to a sweating sickness, and their roles were reversed. 

He’d had to stop crying enough to drag her down to the sept as gently as he could, but she was a full grown woman and no matter how little she ate she was too heavy and he was only eleven, too skinny to pick her up and hold her properly as she deserved to be held. She’d deserved the Great Sept of Baelor, but she got a hole in the ground when it was raining, with a half asleep septon saying the final rights. Yves tried to make it beautiful, but there was only so much wildflowers could do. He tried to look at her that last time, before filling in the hole, and tried to think she was beautiful too, but she just looked like the corpse she was, long and hard and empty. 

His mother was gone. 

_You survived,_ he hears her voice in his head and he reminds himself yes, yes he did - he survived. He could do it again. For her. For five years he survives, until he’s not quick enough with his quick, quick hands and is caught with his hand in a man’s pocket. 

He finds out later he was caught with his hand in a lord’s pocket, which was probably why they were so invested in shipping him off to the Night’s Watch as soon as possible. It was that or lose the offending limb, but all Yves had were his quick hands, so he chose the Wall.

. 

Yves isn’t suited for the back breaking work of building or for serving other men, never has been, so he becomes a ranger. 

He knows he should be happy, but the idea of more cold terrifies him. He’d never known true cold before the Wall. He thought he had, all those namedays when he and mother had to spend all day curled around each other in the corner, skin wet and cool and shivering. True cold was biting, roaring, like fire but also completely unlike it, invisible to the eye but you knew when it arrived, worming its way into your very bones. 

But, perhaps what was worse was realizing that this was the end of the line. This was the last place he’d ever go or be - he was here until he died. 

It hadn’t really sunk in at first, but lately it had become lodged in his brain. Lord Commander Mormont said they were all a family now, but Yves didn’t want murderers and rapists for his family. He wanted his mother, as the eleven year old boy he’d been had wanted her. He didn’t need anyone else. It would be easier, perhaps, if when he looked in the mirror he saw her reflected, but she left little of herself in him - perhaps the shape of his eyes, the set of his jaw, but nothing more. He had the colouring and body of his father, a man who’d gone to the gods before Yves’ birth. 

And so, his two years at the Wall before the Great Ranging became the loneliest of Yves’ short life.

. 

“Bastard! Traitor!” The Halfhand curses Yves with his bound hands, and although Yves knows it’s all part of the plan, he can’t help the small part of him recoils at the man’s words, as Qhorin waves his sword around with his one good hand “You’re going to lead the wildlings straight to Castle Black!” 

“Stop! Stop!” The wildlings flurry around them, until the leader, covered in bones of the dead, with a sadistic smirk says lazily “Let them fight.”

That is what they wanted, Yves reminds himself, as he struggles for the sword thrown at his feet, matching Qhorin’s blows. But he knows, now events are moving forward, that there is only one way that this will end. Yves knows, if this was a true fight, he’d be flat on his back right now, but the wildlings don’t know that he’s a better archer than a swordsman, and the Halfhand does an admirable job at making it seem as if he’s being matched - Yves doesn’t need to act at all to put all his force behind the blows. 

“That’s all you’ve got?” Qhorin Halfhand taunts “You little shit!” Yves can’t say anything, his mouth dry, as the Halfhand charges. 

Their eyes meet and Yves thrusts out his sword completely forward. It’s almost neat, and orderly, the way the ranger is skewered on his sword. The Halfhand looks down at the sword that goes in and out of his belly completely, a small choking noise coming out of his throat, and quiet, so quiet that no one else can he gasps out his last words: “We... are the watchers... on the...Wall.” 

Yves knows, at that exact moment, there’s no going back.

. 

“I think you were lying,” Yves, in his new furs, turns to his accuser and thanks the Seven they’re away from other wildlings, who don’t take the opinion and turn it into a death sentence. 

“Excuse me?” The girl is young, no older than fifteen, but her gaze is hard as she looks at him. 

“To Mance,” she explains, crossing her arms. From her belt, he sees a sword, about the size of a bastard with a sharp edge he has no doubt could slit a man’s throat in a second “I think you were lying to Mance about the Wall. About how many men it has.” 

“Well... I wasn’t.” He says, straightening up. 

Her eyes really are unlike any he’s seen before - they’re grey, like thunderclouds, and Yves feels as if he could drown in them. “Lie to Mance,” she said “But don’t you dare lie to me, crow.” 

“What makes you so special?” he asks her, deciding that its safest to steer the conversation away from himself and any lies he’s told to her king. 

She shrugs, “Nothing, I suppose. But unlike Mance, I’ll know.” 

The girl - woman, really, because beneath her furs her body is developed and not belonging to a child - turns away, and begins trekking through the snow. Yves’ curiosity, as it has so many times before, overrides his common sense screaming at him that this girl could ruin everything, could ruin him, and calls after her “What’s your name?” 

She looks at him over her shoulder, and for the first time in their encounter she smiles “Joanna,” she shouts, and Yves doesn’t think he’s heard anything quite so beautiful before.

.

Joanna becomes his first and finest friend amongst the Free Folk - before he’s accepted enough to sit at campfires, she brings him meat and they have their own dinner, picking apart rabbits and deer and boar together, so at the end of every night they’re sated and tired and in the firelight the grease on her mouth makes Joanna’s lips shine.

“Won’t your mother be worrying about you?” he asks her, just once, and she shakes her head. “Don’t have one,” she says “No father neither. Just little old me.” 

At his stricken face, she laughs “Do they hang you up for asking the wrong questions in the South?” she says, and Yves manages to pull a smile back onto his face. 

“They’ll hang you up for just about anything,” He says, and to his delight Joanna laughs again.

“That’s what Mance says,” Joanna tells him, sucking the grease of their dinner off of her fingers and Yves tries not to be too obvious looking at her plump lips “But I don’t believe him half the time.” 

“Do you believe anything anyone says?” He asks, and she bites her lip. Her eyes shine like stars, and he swears he can see the maiden in her. 

“I try not to,” she answers “I find a bit of distrust goes a long way.”

. 

Yves hears about stealing from a warg - his name is Orell, and he has an eagle that he- well, becomes. It freaks Yves out, but other than that he’s been welcoming enough after the ‘betray us and I’ll slit your throat’ warning he’s gotten from everyone. 

“I’m gonna go after a kissed by fire girl,” he tells him, conversationally as he makes fletchlings.

“A kissed by what girl?” “Like you,” Orell tells him “Fire hair. It’s lucky. I mean, it’ll be hard to steal her, there’s no mistake, but it’ll be worth it, the lucky ones always are-”

“Steal?” Yves says, trying not to sound scandalized and failing. 

“Aye,” Orell says, a feather between his yellowed teeth “Steal. We don’t court like lords and ladies down South, we take what we want.”

“That’s...” Yves wants to say barbaric, but settles on not saying anything. 

“If the girl don’t want ya, she fights back. If she wants you, she still fights cause men love that. That’s how we marry North of the Wall.” Yves swallows thickly, images of Joanna flitting behind his eyes. 

Orell notices the motion. “You got yer eye on someone?” he teases “Any wildling woman is worth ten of your southron women. And we don’t have no lords or ladies, so as long as you think you can take her, you can have her.” Yves excuses himself, and has to fight down his erection for a good half hour.

. 

Joanna does not make doing the right thing easy. 

She seems to become more beautiful with each passing day, looking at him with those big eyes of hers and biting her plump lips. Yves thinks that a beauty like Joanna would turn heads anywhere in the world, and it’s exhilarating and terrifying to think someone like him could, theoretically, have a chance.

Finally, he brings things to a head. 

“Joanna,” he says as she’s running a whetstone down her blade “do you, um, want to be stolen?” 

Her head goes up and she looks at him, her expression unreadable “Where’d you learn about stealing?” 

“Orell, he said-” 

Before he can finish, Jo laughs. “Of course, bloody Orell.” 

Yves shifts, uncomfortable “Do you? I mean, want to-” 

“Maybe,” she says lightly, her lips quirked to one side in an almost-smile. “If it were the right person.” 

Yves swallows. “Would the right person, I mean, could he-” 

“I always liked kissed-by-fire men, myself.” Yves freezes and looks up at her. 

He’s three years her senior, but when she looks at him like that he feels like a little boy all over again. “You mean-” 

“For fucks sake, Yves, come and kiss me already.”

. 

Yves had never dreamed anything could be so good. 

They stumble into a cave, and Joanna’s skin is fresh and clean and soft, her breasts perfectly formed just for him, and the way she falls to her knees in front of him, the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, naked and kneeling before him, some thief from the Riverlands - he doesn’t last very long. 

“You’ll have to do better than that,” she tells him in a low, gravelly voice and he nods dumbly, unable to make any words come forth. 

“I will,” he finally manages to say, and is rewarded with a beautiful smile. 

“Better get practicing,” she says, and Yves has no idea how he managed to get this lucky. 

. 

For a while, Yves forgets about his mission. 

Joanna doesn’t like talking about it much - her lips go all thin and a line appears on her forehead when they talk about the coming battle, about the threat in front of them and behind them, so Yves just stops talking about it too.

Yves doesn’t think the Halfhand imagined he’d get this far, or this involved. 

He climbs the Wall, when others fall he clings on so tight he thinks his fingers won’t move when he needs to reach for the next handhold, he kisses Jo hard and fast and on every inch of her body, becoming addicted to the sound of her voice - her rare laughs, her noncommittal hums and her screams of pleasure. 

No mission crosses his mind when he’s with her, which nearly every moment of every day. 

Yves remembers his mission suddenly, painfully, when Joanna puts her sword to an old man’s throat. He thinks of how he’ll explain his accidental lover to the Old Bear: she’s beautiful, and fast, and funny if you know how to listen. _She can kiss so pretty, and kill pretty, too._

“Let the crow do it,” Orell pronounces his sentence in what feels like slow motion. 

Jo smirks, the lift of the side of her mouth revealing a deep dimple Yves pokes his pinky finger in when he hasn’t slept enough and can’t get enough of her. She steps back, twirling her sword in deft fingers. 

( _When we win_ , she’d whispered to him, _we can go anywhere. Us with our quick hands. We could be anything at all, kings and queens, knights and thieves_.) 

“Clean,” she tells him, “Like I showed you.” 

It’s hard to remember she’s younger than him by three summers sometimes - she knows how to kill fast and clean, messy and slow, how to skin a rabbit and a kill an ox and wield a sword like it’s an extension of her arm, telling him that he’s hers now, now and forever, and she’s his, and he better be loyal, better never leave her, cause she knows how to cut off cocks too. 

Yves knows he could do it - it’d be easy, so easy, to pull his arm back and go straight in the heart - a clean death, a quick death. 

Better than what old age would give the man, who trembles in front of him, old eyes full of resignation. 

He can’t do it. 

Yves is a thief, Yves has always been a thief - the gods gifted him with quick, quick hands that weren’t meant for killing. Maybe thieving wasn’t exactly what they had in mind, but never killing. He’s not a murderer, never has been, can’t be. He knows murderers, has made a family from them - there’s a dead look in their eyes, murderers, and he’s not that. 

The look in Jo’s eyes when he lets his arm go lax instead of releasing the arrow makes him feel like he’s a killer all the same.

. 

She catches up to him quickly, quicker than he’d hoped, her knuckles white around her sword. 

“You have been lying this whole time, haven’t you?” she says, voice hard, and it’s a punch in the gut to realize he still loves her, even when there’s murder in her eyes and a blade pointed straight at his chest. 

“I had to,” he says “Joanna, you know I didn’t have a choice-” 

“Coward,” she curses him, stepping forward so he has to stumble back, “Craven. You had a choice. You always had a choice. I gave you a choice.” 

“What?” he says, “Betray my brothers? My country?” 

“They’re not your family.” she tells him “I could have been your family. This could have been your country.” 

Yves shakes his head, because she’s so young and somehow he’d tricked himself into forgetting how very young she was. “You know nothing, Joanna,” he tells her, and she lets out a shout of rage, lunging for him. He ducks so it does no serious damage, but it does nick his cheek, and a stinging feeling tells him she’s drawn blood. 

“I know I love you,” she screams, before throwing down her sword “I thought you loved-” 

She doesn’t finish her sentence, instead choosing to fly at him, scratching at his face with her nails and kicking his chest. Yves is bigger, and stronger, but something makes her more determined, and before he can wrestle her down she’s landed hits that in later days become huge purple bruises that make him hiss when he touches them gingerly. 

“Stop,” he pants when he finally has her on the ground “Just stop. I have to go. I have to. I love you. I have to go.” 

“Bastard,” she swears him, and despite himself he recoils at the word “Liar. They all told me you’d leave but I believed you. I believed you, I don’t believe fucking anyone and I fucking believed you, coward, craven, filth-” 

He cuts off her tirade by raising her head up once and then down again, hard, so that she’s stunned on the ground. 

Knowing it won’t last for long, he clambers off her and dives for his horse, kicking its sides desperately. He still ends up with a knife in his side, Jo having pulled it out of her boot and throwing it after him - nothing lethal, but it is still six inches too close to his heart for comfort. 

.

“Tell me about her,” Fat Sam asks him, his piggy eyes round and full of wonder in the firelight. 

Yves has never paid much attention to him before, but now Maester Aemon’s assistant is one of the few black brothers that will still look him in the eyes after him somehow surviving his trial for desertion and oathbreaking. 

“Joanna?” Yves says, throat suddenly dry, and Sam nods the affirmative. “She, she had black hair,” Yves tells him, trying to imagine a way of describing her that would do her justice but even in his head everything he comes up with feels lacking “She had a smile just for me. It’s- it’s hard to explain. It’s like you’re no longer just you anymore, you’re someone else, and they’re you, and you’re all wrapped up in each other and it’s like you’ll die if you ever go apart. It’s- damn it, I’m not a fucking poet.” 

“I can tell,” Sam tells him, amusement in his tone, before turning serious “I wish I’d had something like that before I came here. Just the once.” 

“Just the once is all you need,” Yves tells him, and they spend the rest of the night in comfortable silence. 

.

Yves doesn’t know how long the battle has been raging, but everything aches - his thighs, calves, shoulders, back, sides, arms, fingers - they’re all consumed by a burning, writhing pain that grows with every arrow he knocks and looses, with every time he has to duck so quick he hears something crack, with every movement. 

It’s all a blur of blood and pain and screaming, gods, the screaming - Yves doesn’t think there’s any gods on any battlefield, old or new. There’s too much suffering. 

Yet, everything slows and becomes impossibly sharp when a cold blade touches his throat, his attacker behind him. “Crow,” a voice says from behind him, and something in his chest actually relaxes. Her blade is sharp and he knows it could kill him easy, but he doesn’t want anyone else to end him. 

“Joanna,” he says, and he smiles. She can’t see that, though. “Go on then,” he says “Make it quick. I know you know how.” 

The blade tightens against his throat, and Yves closes his eyes. He’s ready. 

But the cold metal never bites down, and after a few beats it’s removed from his throat. He turns, slow, afraid any fast movement will make her go for him. 

But Joanna isn’t looking at him. Her blade is on the ground beside her, covered in mud. 

Her eyes are fixed at an area between her breasts, below her collarbone, where an arrow head is poking out of her furs, covered in dark red blood. She touches it with shaking fingers and hisses. 

“Jo,” Yves stumbles forward and catches her as her legs fail her. 

“Hurts,” she tells him, teeth chattering, as their eyes meet. It’s a cold night, but Yves knows that isn’t why she’s shivering, “Hurts.” 

“The battle’s almost over,” Yves tells her, and strokes her hair like his mother used to stroke his, and hopes it’s a comfort, “We’ve got a maester here, he can fix you up as good as new. You just need to hold on-” 

“Is this, is this a real castle, now?” she pants, grey eyes wide in pain. “I always wanted to see one, before I, before I-” 

“Yes, yes, you’ll see a hundred castles,” Yves insists, “You’re not going to die, you’re not.” 

Joanna laughs, or tries to, but cries out at the pain of the movement, “Don’t you lie to me. Don’t.” 

Tears rise in her eyes, and Yves can feel his own eyes welling up. “The arrow is holding the blood in,” he tells her, remembering what Sam told him about battle wounds, and how to treat them, “As long as you stay still and it doesn’t come out, you could be saved, you can.” 

Her face screws up, and a single tear rolls down her deathly pale cheek “But it hurts. I’m so cold. Hurts.” 

“Do you, do you remember that cave?” Yves asks in desperation, trying to take her mind away from the pain and the cold. 

“It was so warm,” Joanna says, her eyes looking at the open sky above her head, “You were so kind. I loved you, then.” 

“I love you now,” Yves tells her, and the truth of it is like a punch in the chest, “You’re not going to die.” 

She smiles at him, although it looks more like a grimace, and before he realizes what is happening she reaches up, takes a hold of the arrow head and _pulls._ The girl makes a sound like an animal dying, and Yves can hear his own voice a chorus above the swords and cries for help and thumps of dead bodies - _oh gods, oh no, oh stop, seven save her, seven save her-_

“Better,” she says, even as her precious lifesblood pours forth, mixing with the blood and snow on the ground. 

Yves places his hands above where he thinks the wound is and tries to cover it, but all it does is make his hands - his quick, quick hands - red with her blood. 

“I can stop it,” he babbles “I can save you, you’re not going to die here, you can’t die here-” 

“It's so beautiful,” she says, and reaches up for his cheek but doesn’t seem to quite have the strength to get there. He doesn't know what she means - to him it feels like he's in hell. Her eyes glaze over, and beneath his palms her blood stops flowing. 

“You’re not going to die,” he says again, and shakes her. “You can’t die, not here, you’ll see a hundred castles-” 

_Don’t you lie to me_ , Joanna’s spectre whispers in his ear, _I’ll know._

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave kudos and a comment if you enjoyed it, feedback is super important to me!


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